1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates in general to a television system, and more particularly, to a technique for integrating heterogeneous operating systems in a television system.
2. Description of the Related Art
As technology products and the Internet both expand and converge, types and quantity of resources including text, graphics, video clips, music and games acquirable by a user through the Internet have expanded at an overwhelmingly fast pace. Therefore, it is a common vision and trend to incorporate Internet resources into household or commercial multimedia systems that can then provide users with more convenient and versatile information entertainment platforms.
A principal part of a multimedia system is the television. Therefore, it is a goal of television system designers to effectively integrate resources and applications acquired through the Internet into a television system.
A key issue in the above integration is that, not all applications acquired through the Internet are compatible to an operating system of the television system. For example, an operating environment of a television system may be Linux, whereas an application acquired through the Internet is only suitable in an Android operating system. The Linux operating system and the Android operating system have a same kernel but different function libraries—the two operating systems are heterogeneous operating systems. In a situation where the operating environment or the application stays unmodified, the application cannot be executed in the television system.
To overcome the foregoing incompatibility issue, a common approach is to modify original source code of television system software, so that the modified source code can adapt to an application compatible to another operating system. However, such approach requiring substantial modifications to the source code of the television system software is not only time and effort consuming but also extremely difficult. Moreover, when further integration of different types of operating systems in the television system is desired, such an approach of modifying the source code of the television system software is almost infeasible. Therefore, flexibility and augmentation possibilities rendered by an Internet television achieved through the foregoing conventional solution are rather unsatisfactory.